FEATURE
CONNECTING DATA CENTERS WITH SUBMARINE CABLES Driving Innovation and Key Metrics
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round 2.8 billion people around the world use at least one of our family of services, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp, each month, communicating with friends and family from all over. In addition, machine learning (ML) has become increasingly important for keeping users safe and secure; for providing relevant rankings and recommendations; and for powering AR and VR applications. Via AI models deployed at scale, we perform over 6 billion language translations every day. Our growing network of data centers (DCs) are responsible for supporting all of these use cases and securely transporting this information around the globe. To keep pace with this demand, we have had to innovate and push the submarine cable industry forward in several key areas, including open submarine cables, Submarine Line Terminating Equipment (SLTE) technology, Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM), the replacement of copper conductor with aluminum, new marine approaches and optical switching technologies and applications. Our 15 announced DCs are shown in Figure 1. Each DC needs to communicate with other DCs and POPs, frequently across continents. Aerial shots of our 15 data centers are shown in Figure 2, including our newly an-
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE
STEVE GRUBB, HERVE FEVRIER AND ANDY PALMER-FELGATE
nounced DC in Singapore. When completed, this DC will be a candidate for the world’s largest under one roof. The constraints of building such a massive structure in Singapore required a novel vertical design that minimizes the footprint. It also has several innovative systems developed to minimize energy and water usage. To connect DCs such as this to our global network at the extremely high availability target required by our systems, we need multiple submarine cable paths as well as new submarine cable mesh architectures. To obtain submarine cable systems at the required scale and with the necessary network availability, Facebook has had to either build or co-build systems with partners on numerous submarine cable systems. The submarine systems that Facebook has been involved with to date are: MAREA, Havfrue, Hong Kong America’s (HKA), Pacific Light Communication Network (PLCN), Jupiter, and MALBEC. Facebook has also leased fibers or capacity on over a dozen other global submarine cables. Given this significant investment in submarine cables, we want to ensure that they are scalable to meet both current and future capacity demands, cost effective (measured by the $/Tbs, and $/fp metrics), and as highly reliable as possible. Achieving these goals